ecoculture, geophilosophy, mediapolitics

Life outside the lava lamp

Over at Naught Thought, Ben Woodard (sorry, Ben, for the earlier misspell) wants “to know what the Process/Relational folks think” of his thoughts about philosophies of process versus philosophies of objects or substances (or something like that). What follows is one quick and dirty way of thinking of a certain key difference between these two approaches.

I generally agree with Leon‘s and Adam‘s arguments that the differences have been overstated, particularly if one takes into account Levi Bryant’s admission that his objects are processes, or at least processual in nature. (Graham Harman is the OOO thinker who has made the most out of the differences between the OOO and PR camps, though Tim Morton’s characterization of the latter as “lava lampy materialism” has been, as Ben and others suggest, not particularly helpful. I’ll leave that aside; it’s been much discussed on this blog already, and elsewhere.)

For all the similarities, however, there is, to my mind, a basic difference in perspective. This is that the OOO position begins from the presumption of a world of stable, self-consistent substances, and then goes on to ask what those substances (objects) do, how they interact, what happens when a new thing enters into an existing array of things (the ecological question, for Levi), and so on. Process-relational thinkers, on the other hand, look at the world and see not objects but occurrences, events, relational processes.

To make that more tangible: when I look outside my window at home, I can see a lake (Champlain), mountains (the Adirondacks), darkening blue sky with an airplane crossing it, a few boats on the water, some trees, a family of bicyclists riding along the bike path down below, and so on.

Or, alternatively, I can look out the window and see myself looking and seeing the lake (etc.), hearing voices, etc. — and others looking and seeing me, responding to my voice (which just said “What is that thing down there on the lake?”), or responding to other things (the communicative chirpings of insects, and so on). I see seeings, hearings, sensings, perceivings, chirpings, resonations, etc. Some of these are “mine” and others may not be, and because they’re not “mine” I’m less sure of exactly what they are. But I have no reason to believe that they are not similar in nature to my sensings and perceivings and feelings. In other words, I see my seeing (hearing, feeling, etc.) things, and I see a world that sees and feels me, and that is itself made up of seeings and feelings.

These seeings, hearings, feelings, sensings, and so on — these prehensions — are the real things populating a process-relational world. They are its basic bits. Once this is accepted — and I agree that it does take a twist of mind to start thinking in these terms — we can start asking the more interesting kinds of questions: like, given that the basic stuff of reality is prehensive in nature (“takings-account of things”), how is it that some such prehensions manage to coordinate fairly large and complex processes (like a whole human bodymind communicating images and ideas to another such bodymind, or to a whole suite of others located around the planet)? How did these complex kinds of relational capacities arise? What are our possibilities for entering into and affecting other kinds of processes? Which processual moments are more open to collective engagement (e.g., to revolutionary transformations) than others?

Ben writes:

I think if thinkers of process and becoming want to relate this to processes and powers and becomings, there needs to a rigorous account of the breaks, the actualizations, the triads or whatever it may be, that show the work of becoming without a human agent making the call, without the human carving out the individuated bits of the world.

If I’m understanding this correctly, I think Ben is getting at the Meillassouxian critique of “correlationism,” which claims that most modern philosophers have tried to understand the world only in terms by which the human mind (“a human agent making the call,” “the human carving out the individuated bits of the world”) is accorded metaphysical centrality. As I’ve argued before, this critique is correct (i.e., useful and appropriate) insofar as it points to the need to get beyond an anthropocentric understanding of the universe. But it is incorrect, from a process-relational perspective, if it assumes that we can arrive at an understanding of the world without understanding the understandingitself (i.e. processes of prehension, whatever form they take) as an essential — and in fact as the central — element of that world.

So, for process-relational thinkers, it’s not correlationism that’s the problem; it’s human-correlation-chauvinism (which is a variation of what Peter Singer and others call speciesism).

Again, for process-relational thinkers, in my understanding, the basic substance of the universe is experiential in nature. The basic “bits” of the world are not stable entities, but are experiential events (prehensions, feelingful takings-account-of-things). Given this, what needs explaining is how such events coalesce into sustained relational entities that develop and interact in particular kinds of ways — how the world develops stabilities, how we can enter into stabilities to bring about particular kinds of changes, new relations, and so on. (Or what bodyminds can do.)

Those stabilities that make up the organized forms of the world come in all forms. Some are lumpy, wavy, or lava lampy; others are crusty, crystalline, percussive, lightning-like, rhythmic, or netted, knotted, and webbed. And still others are altogether ghostly — for instance, because they’re beyond the prehensive capacities of bipeds like us except to the extent that we develop technical tools that can register their traces. Weather, I would say, is pretty lava-lampy on the whole; but climate is more ghostly (which is why climate change is so contentious).

I’m not particularly bothered by the critique of “lava lampiness.” It’s a fun game to associate certain ideas with retro cultural styles. It tells us little about what’s being critiqued (e.g., process-relational philosophy) and a lot about what those who deliver that critique are trying to disidentify themselves from. As a critique of process-relational ontologies, it just doesn’t hold, because those ontologies are interested in all the different kinds of worldlinesses that exist: not just the fluid, swelling crescendoes, but the trumpet blasts, the percussive dins, the rhythmic bass throbs and arpeggios, the twitters and chirps and wails and passion-soaked arias. Everything.

Ultimately, process-relational and object-oriented thinkers alike are interested in making sense of the universe — what it’s made of, how it works, and so on — in ways that (among other things) get beyond the anthropocentric (culturalist, etc.) focus of much twentieth-century philosophy. Our goals are not all that different, but the steps we take to get there are. And that’s okay by me, and certainly nothing to get upset about.

17 Responses

Concerning “Again, for process-relational thinkers, in my understanding, the basic substance of the universe is experiential in nature,” that accurately describes Dewey and effectively Peirce. We’re on the same page. Hence, rocks literally “experience” each other, i.e., transact. Nature is what experiences, and in any particular case it is a localized part of nature experiencing another part. A really interesting moment is when this “experience” becomes “human conscious experience.” However, that moment originates, e.g., in solid earth and gushing biology long before I consciously experience it as tripping on the rock. It experienced me alright, but organic homeostasis is not so important for its “dynamic system” or “flow.”

Oh yes, I’ve read that. Hildebrand is a good Dewey and pragmatist scholar, and I would recommend his work. That paper basically explains what “pragmatism” is, since in the analytic world the word is associated with neopragmatism, which is a much latter and quite distinct offshoot that jettisons most of the classical theories and perspectives for analytical ones. I still love Rorty, Quine, Putnam, and Davidson, but they are not all there is to pragmatism.

In contrast, most “classicals” are continental-friendly if not dual scholars, and the humanities editor at Fordham tells me that she sells more continental books at our small conference (SAAP) than at any other similar sized conference. Fordham, btw, is becoming the pre-eminent publisher of classical pragmatism since Indiana UP veered towards neopragmatist publications over classical ones

what I thought was interesting in this context was where Hildebrand says:
The larger point is that even metaphysical inquiry can be done pragmatically, that is, without axiomatic premises…The “agreement” Dewey rights “is agreement in activities, not intellectual acceptance of the same set of propositions.”

I am mostly in agreement with Dewey on that point. Basically, metaphysics is intended to be abductive, an inference to the best explanation to how the world is in such a way as to have significant consequences for how we approach it. This is an instance of the essence of pragmatism; how would this hypothesis alter activity, best measured against (experimentally) verifiable consequences? Dewey knew that to be quite a valuative activity, and his aim was progressive improve in our descriptions for the purpose of (human) amelioration and growth as the ultimate ideal. Hence, ethics is first philosophy and is generative, although is becomes almost identical with aesthetics. (This poses some serious problems.)

One reason I chose process metaphysics over substance is through asking the question of whether it makes me a better person and thinker. I thought so. This might seem quite odd to many professional philosophers. It might then be no surprise that so many neoclassical pragmatists are humanists and primarily educators rather pure researchers.

I think that the ameliorative aspect of pragmatism often gets lost in these metaphysical conversations, and is one of the deweyish concerns about the anticorrelationalist bent, not the continuing of the hermeneutics of suspicion, blows to human ego-centrism, that fits in well with evolutionary fallibalism, but the sense in which one is writing to and for people and in which the measure/difference-which-makes-a-difference is one of effects on human life/project-ions and not on some imagined fit with Reality.
There are some good reasons for doubting if the concept of The Mangle of Practice does more work than the descriptions/accounts given in support of it but this STS/ANT line of thought seems well in keeping with Dewey’s interests (as Stengers would say). Unfortunately Stengers Radical Philosophy bit on William James is not freely available anymore but for folks with journal access I highly recommend it.

Thanks for the nice discussion of pragmatism, Dewey, etc. I (predictably?) agree with both your lines of thinking here: the (classical/neoclassical) pragmatists’ continual reference to the small-r reality of life projects, issues, etc. is too valuable to lose in Speculative Realists’ flirtations with capital-R Reality. The trick, for me, has always been to see the link between the two as part of what’s to be explained: how could we possibly explain Reality without acknowledging our own motivations for wanting to do that, our own situatedness within the Reality being explained, and the effects of our explanatory efforts on the world around us?

I agree that Hildebrand’s piece is a very nice critical introduction to the Rortyan/neopragmatist (linguistic) shift and some of what it entails. And while Dewey has his limits, I have a real soft spot for him and often use him as a reference point – which is useful around here (Burlington, VT), where Dewey is both the most famous person born in this city and most famous graduate of its university (where I teach).

And I do like the ‘mangle of practice’ thread within STS and ANT (which develops into its cosmopolitics, I would say)…

Jason: You write

“ethics is first philosophy and is generative, although is becomes almost identical with aesthetics. (This poses some serious problems.)”

and

“One reason I chose process metaphysics over substance is through asking the question of whether it makes me a better person and thinker.”

I’m curious to know what you think are the serious problems @ the almost-identity of ethics and aesthetics. As for the “better person-ness” enabled by process metaphysics, I think it’s a difficult argument to sustain (and make convincing for others), but I do think there’s a basic intuition that many process folks tend to follow about how the metaphysics (being open-ended, fallibilist, evolutionary, etc.) facilitates an openness to learning, changing one’s views, etc.

In general I think that trying to get as clear/comprehensive a picture as possible of the conditions at hand can certainly help us to have a sense of what might be possible, or not, in a given situation but can never tell us what should be done, no oughts arising from an is.
Dewey certainly does have his limits but for me he is one of the pivotal figures in what I see as an important anthropological turn (after Darwin and away from Hegel) in philosophy (here I follow Rorty’s reading of the later Wittgenstein as fleshing out the pragmatist insights of earlier Heidegger but think that Rorty was wrong to privilege literature over existential anthropology/practices, see the Rabinow lecture I left over at knowledge ecology with calvin&hobbes). And along these lines I see no real alternative to following William James/Shaviro ad the neurophenomenologists in recognizing that aesthetics is inseparable from ethics and all other aspects of human-being-in-the-world, we are feeling our way through the world, and manipulating without end as we go and need learn to take response-ability for our project-ions.
I see no evidence that any theoretical stance is more open/transformative/poetic than any other, here I agree with St.Fish that we are all closed off, dead-set, in some ways, and that just having ideas isn’t enough, we must find a way to live them out and pace dear Rorty reading/writing alone just won’t get at the habitual roots of such matters.
A.I .have you read? http://herts.academia.edu/DanieleMoyalSharrock/Books/105533/Perspicuous_Presentations_Essays_on_Wittgensteins_Philosophy_of_Psychology

richard sennett on the assault in our workworlds on craft and quality, and how craft may lend itself to opening-up/experimentation vs the market trend towards quick results/payoffs:http://www.mefeedia.com/watch/25053601

Apologies. I am not getting follow-up comment notifications for any blogs I post on…. Not sure why. So I’m just now seeing this.

The very serious danger of the (near) identity of morality and aesthetics is the danger of the moral aesthete as understood from a phenomenological perspective. This is the person that knows what good people look like, and what actions are good. I see this all the time in the ritual denunciations of racism, sexism, etc. in the academy and the often simultaneous perpetuation of those activities, structures, institutions. Hence, I’m pointing at the problem of how the world becomes meaningful for us in its myriad orders (our operational aesthetic to be taken in a Kantian-derivative or phenomenological sense) and how that is established qua culture, sociality, etc. (I leave the biology to scientists.)

The danger of taking ethics as first philosophy, as Sidney Hook proposed for pragmatism, and not noting the danger of moral aestheticism is that you may then theoretically inscribe your practical blindness already had. Or to put it in Aristotelian terms, your faults in practical wisdom will leave a trace in your theoretical wisdom. This is not a new issue for the 20th century, and I am sure it is better said elsewhere. It poses a practically dangerous problem for pragmatism given its commitment to situational immanence (Dewey).

Looking back, I’m sure I can try to explain this better at a later time or on my blog. I think my explanation hear is not clear enough.

here is another thoughtful account of Dewey which defends him from Rorty’s historicist reduction/deflation, champions his inclusive thinking on relations and intrinsic qualities, and highlights his points of contact with McDowell:http://www.petergodfreysmith.com/PGSDeweyMcD-06H.pdf

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